In the field of project planning, a project manager can establish a project plan for a project by defining tasks and groups of tasks. A task can have a beginning time, and ending time, and a time duration between the beginning time and the ending time over which the task is to be completed. Furthermore, the project manager can set up or define dependencies between tasks within the project plan. For various reasons, often a situation may arise where a task is to be rushed or completed in a hurry, ahead of its originally established due time. This happens across many businesses and industries. However, moving up a completion date of a task may result in a reduced quality for the result of the task.
For example, if the task is to paint a building, the quality of the resultant paint job may suffer if the task, which is normally scheduled to be accomplished over a period of five days, is altered to be completed in just three days. However, the degradation in quality may be unknown. Similarly, if a quality criterion is relaxed by a certain amount, the amount of time saved in completing the task to the new, lower quality standard may be unknown. Today, trying to relate quality to time involves gathering a large number of data points for every type of task for every type of industry or technology. Often, however, such data points are not available.